A prior art information processing apparatus, as disclosed in, for example, patent reference 1, allows the user to specify a region of interest first, acquires information on the position of the region of interest, and forms additional information, as well as information attached to the position information (i.e., utilization information). The prior art information processing apparatus then embeds the additional information, just as it is, in an embedding region of original image data, which can be the whole of the original image data or the specified region of interest, by means of an electronic watermarking method, and manages the image data and additional information without discriminating between them. This patent reference 1 also discloses a patchwork method and a basic electronic watermarking method associated with reliability distance. Using the patchwork method and basic electronic watermarking method, the prior art information processing apparatus carries out highlighting of the boundary of the region of interest in which the additional information is embedded to produce a display of the position of the detected region of interest on the image.
Patent reference 1: JP, 2002-190945, A (see paragraph numbers 0058 to 0061, 0065 to 0081, and 0158)
A problem with the prior art information processing apparatus constructed as mentioned above is that while the user is allowed to specify a region of interest first, because in a mode in which the prior art information processing apparatus embeds additional information in only the region of interest, the prior art information processing apparatus does not refer to the amount of the additional information to be embedded in the region of interest, and therefore must provide a margin for the specified region of interest to make it larger in a stage where the amount of the additional information to be embedded in the region of interest is undecided, the prior art information processing apparatus cannot embed the additional information in the region of interest efficiently especially in a case in which the amount of the additional information to be embedded in the image is restricted.
Another problem is that because the prior art information processing apparatus must specify the region of interest on the image so as to make it larger, it cannot show only the intended region of interest effectively.
The present invention is made in order to solve the above-mentioned problems, and it is therefore an object of the present invention to provide an information processing apparatus for and an information processing method of referring to the amount of additional information including related information on a point of interest on an image specified by the user and allocating an embedding region required for embedding of the additional information appropriately so that the additional information can be embedded efficiently in a whole image region, and only the point of interest, as an intended region of interest, and the related information can be shown effectively.